The book
was Crashing The Gates: The De-WASPing Of America`s Power Elite,by the
late Robert C.
Christopher, a former journalist and Pulitzer Prize
administrator. I used the review to get at a number of
American ethnic shibboleths. At the time, I remember
noting that
Norman Podhoretz, the great editor of
Commentary, had cut out a passage on immigration
reflecting concerns that were later expressed in my book

Alien Nation. Rereading the review now, I
am stuck with how many radical ideas Norman left in,
although he could hardly have agreed with them. Eighteen
years later, the
neoconservatives` climb to power has left many
angry enemies among their erstwhile allies on the right.
But it should not be forgotten that one key factor in
their success was sheer intellectual energy.

I
concluded my review by pointing out the paradox that
affirmative action quotas applied in favor of
low-performing groups like blacks and Hispanics, but not
against high-performing groups like Jews and Asians,
effectively mean that WASPS in particular and whites in
general are squeezed out of elite colleges. As we note
in the text below,

Pat Buchanan cited it, to general hysteria. The
point I made then remains all too true today: “What
this really means is that WASPs (and non-Jewish white
ethnics) have not yet found a political language in
which to protest that they are in fact being
systematically discriminated against.”

Robert C. Christopher`s
amiable journalistic survey of the current state of
the American ethnic union begins with the sort of bang
that might be expected from a
writer who was for many years an editor at
Newsweek:

"On
July 21, 1988, when a dark, compact man of
vaguely Mediterranean appearance stepped up to the
podium in Atlanta`s Omni Coliseum to accept the
Democratic nomination for the presidency of the United
States, it seemed to some that American history had
entered a new era.”

Christopher then discreetly
proceeds to qualify this popular view. He notes that
although the emergence of Michael Dukakis, the son of
Greek immigrants, was hailed as "the embodiment of
the American ethnic dream",the nominee
himself was in fact
already deracinated to a considerable extent.
Dukakis had been educated at elite schools,
Swarthmore and Harvard. Significantly, he was
technically no longer eligible to receive
Greek Orthodox sacraments because his
marriage, to a Jewish woman, had not been celebrated
in a Church ceremony.

Moreover, Christopher adds,
Dukakis`s nomination had actually been preceded by a
dramatic nationwide "disintegration of ethnic
barriers." In the years since 1960, when John F.
Kennedy became the
first Roman Catholic to win the
Democratic nomination and the presidency, non-WASP
white ethnics had unmistakably arrived in force
throughout what Christopher calls the U.S. "power
elite." The result, he believes, is an evolving
cultural synthesis, at least at this highest social
level, that cannot be identified with any ethnic group.
It can only be called, he claims, "American."

Much of Christopher`s book is
devoted to an entertaining and perceptive account of
this ethnic eruption. As he charitably says, it has
happened so recently that scholars and journalists have
not yet had time to adjust their long-cherished theories
about prejudice and the persistence of ethnic
stratification. In politics, the last thirty years have
seen not only the first Catholic President but also the
first black and
Italian-American Supreme Court Justices and Cabinet
officers and the
first Jewish and
Eastern European Secretaries of State. In business,
surveys show that the proportion of Protestant
executives in major companies is falling precipitously,
and that a substantial majority of first-generation
millionaires are now non-WASP. In higher education,
whereas an observer in 1966 remarked that not one in a
thousand college presidents elected over the previous
seventeen years had been a Jew, by 1987 top schools like
MIT, Columbia,
Dartmouth, Pennsylvania, Chicago,
Michigan, and Princeton all had-or had had-Jewish
presidents. And the
Council on Foreign Relations, grimly agreed by
Left and Right to be the linchpin of the American
establishment, had acquired by 1986 a chairman, a
president, and half a board of directors drawn from
other than its traditional WASP male clientele.

Christopher points out, however,
that this process is no simple
displacement of America`s historic WASP elite.
Instead, all ethnic groups are merging. The notion of
the
melting pot has been out of favor with intellectuals
since the 1960`s, when
"cultural pluralism" came into vogue. But in
Christopher`s view that pot has nevertheless been
bubbling away with
extraordinary vigor. And it is not even the modified
"triple melting pot" hypothesized by some
scholars, roughly refining Americans into Protestant,
Catholic, and Jewish religious blocs. Intermarriage is
dissolving all these distinctions. For example, about
half of all American Catholics of Italian or
part-Italian ancestry born since World War II have
married non-Catholics, mainly
Protestants. And whereas Jewish-Gentile unions were
rare as late as 1963, when Nathan Glazer and
Daniel Patrick Moynihan published their influential
pluralistic study Beyond the Melting Pot,
by the 1980`s some 40 percent of Jews were intermarrying.
Kitty Dukakis, in this respect at least, was setting
a trend.

One telling symptom of this
changing significance of ethnicity: non-WASP politicians
have been winning office, not by mobilizing their own
ethnic bloc vote as previously, but by appealing to
ideological supporters across ethnic lines. Thus there
were eight Jewish Senators in 1987, as compared to one—New
York`s Herbert Lehman—in 1949. [VDARE.COM
note:As of the
2006 election, there are

13]. And four of them came from states
where Jews constituted less than 1 percent of the
population.

Similarly, Dukakis`s supposed
special attractiveness to white ethnics did not prevent
them from
voting for George Bush. Christopher politely
suggests that ridicule of Bush`s
"preppy" establishmentarian characteristics was
actually a thin disguise for straightforward anti-WASP
animosity. But it did not work.

Academic sociologists will no doubt
be irritated by the impressionistic and anecdotal
support Christopher musters for his assertions. But
there can be little doubt that he is on to something. In
the late 1970`s,
President Carter told an Italian-American audience
that the U.S. was
not a melting pot but a minestrone—each ingredient
contributing but remaining distinct. Christopher remarks
dryly that this was questionable even in
culinary terms; sociologically, on the evidence
presented here, it was a fashionable delusion on a par
with America`s alleged
"inordinate fear of Communism."

Nevertheless, the phenomenon
Christopher describes is open to a different
interpretation, which he himself goes some way to
developing. Despite its reputation, the WASP elite, as
he points out, was never really exclusive. On the
contrary, it has shown throughout its history a
remarkable ability to assimilate other groups so
completely that their divergent origins become quite
forgotten, such as Germans (Rockefellers), Dutch (Roosevelts),
and French (Du
Ponts). Christopher himself has an anglicized name;
others of his forebears were
Scotch-Irish, in colonial times a
notoriously unruly and
unpopular minority.

For the WASPs, absorbing fellow
Protestants from Northern Europe was obviously easier
than swallowing the children of the immigrants from
Southern and
Eastern Europe who arrived at the turn of the
century. But it is at least arguable that the post-1960"disintegration of ethnic barriers" is simply the
latest leap of assimilation, bearing in mind that WASP
culture has itself relaxed considerably in the same
period. Christopher refers repeatedly to the
"brutal bargain," a phrase that
Norman Podhoretz has used to describe the
necessary submission of an
earlier generation of ambitious ethnics to WASP
values. The bargain, in this account at least, now
appears rather more bland.

In fact, a determinedly cheerful
blandness pervades Christopher`s work whenever he comes
close to confronting the harsher realities of the
process he is describing. It is ultimately why
Crashing the Gates remains an exercise in a minor
key.

One reason for this blandness is
Christopher`s own seemingly complete innocence of
anything resembling religious feeling. The idea that
WASPs or Jews might actually have some reason other than
sheer cultural inertia to want to see their children
continue their faith seems never to have occurred to
him. This, of course, makes intermarriage a much easier
issue to contemplate. It may also explain the sweeping
confidence that leads Christopher to dismiss in one
paragraph the rise of "born-again" Protestants
and
anti-abortion Catholics-something obviously
antithetical to his brave new irreligious "power
elite"—as "essentially rearguard actions
conducted by diehards in the lower middle class and
working class."

BUT whatever his
insensitivity to religious sentiment, Christopher is
acutely aware of prevailing political emotions. This is
most obvious in his treatment of the continuing failure
of blacks, and to a lesser extent Hispanics, to achieve
the ranks of the "power elite." (Asian immigrants
are already doing so, and also intermarrying on an
impressive scale.) Throughout the book Christopher
undeviatingly ascribes this failure to "racism"
on the part of whites. Ignoring the
internal problems of the black community, he
consistently maintains that blacks will join the
mainstream if only
that racism is eradicated. He does admit, however,
that his attitude "smacks of pollyanna."

Similarly, Christopher rarely al
lows himself to dwell on any of the problems associated
with the "disintegration of ethnic barriers"
since the 1960`s. He notices unhappily the paradox that
this "disintegration" seems to have been
accompanied by "affirmative action"—racial
quotas—and
bilingual education. But he has no insight to offer
on the developing Lebanonization of America`s "common
culture," and quickly drops the topic.

This is particularly unfortunate
because of the interesting role quotas have played in
"de-WASPing" the American elite. Many top American
schools were originally founded by one or another of the
WASP religious sects. When these schools were in effect
nationalized earlier in this century, WASPs essentially
lost control of their own major ethnic institutions.
More recently, many of these schools have simultaneously
imposed minimum entrance quotas for blacks and Hispanics
and lifted or relaxed maximum quotas for Jews and
Asians. Since quotas are a zero-sum game, this can only
mean that WASPs (and white ethnics as well) are being
squeezed out. In particular, the WASP elite has less
room to continue its invigorating transfusion of
"scholarship boys" from the poor Anglo-Saxon
hinterlands like Appalachia, an ethnic reservoir that
Christopher for some reason says must be excluded from
his discussion.

For example, Christopher reports
that a third of the student body of his own alma
mater,
Yale, is now Jewish. Assume a
black tenth and an Asian tenth (at least), and WASPs
are already down to less than half of an institution
they once owned-even before accommodating Catholics. In
strict logic, quotas should be uniformly applied. But,
says Christopher, "no educator of any substance has
even by implication proposed such measures—if only
because in the contemporary United States, it is
impossible to advocate systematic discrimination against
the members of any ethnic or religious group without
incurring an intolerable degree of public obloquy."
What this really means is that WASPs (and non-Jewish
white ethnics) have not yet found a political language
in which to protest that they are in fact being
systematically discriminated against. Christopher is
not about to help them.

[VDARE.COM
NOTE: Ron Unz
made the point about whites being discriminated against
in the Wall
Street Journal, November 16, 1998,

Questions of justice aside, does
this matter? Does ethnic composition have consequences?
Once again, Christopher takes refuge in blandness. For
example, he notes that American academia has become
steadily more left-wing in tone as non-WASPs have moved
into the professoriate. But then he produces an
astonishing explanation: political conservatism in
academia has been shown to correlate with religious
belief, whether Protestant, Catholic, or Jewish. And a
conservative believer is necessarily at a disadvantage
in academic competition with a liberal skeptic—because
he "insists that a large body of dogma must be taken
as given."

Actually, entirely secular liberals
are extremely insistent on their own
large body of dogma, as anyone can testify who has
watched the
hysteria that overcomes an officeful of American
editors and journalists when any article discussing
ethnicity or race is proposed. Under these
circumstances, Christopher`s bowdlerized and finally
unserious account of this profound subject is probably
about as much as can be expected.